Sunday, April 7, 2013

We're pleased to announce the 2.0 beta 2 release of PyPy. This is a major
release of PyPy and we're getting very close to 2.0 final, however it includes
quite a few new features that require further testing. Please test and report
issues, so we can have a rock-solid 2.0 final. It also includes a performance
regression of about 5% compared to 2.0 beta 1 that we hope to fix before
2.0 final. The ARM support is not working yet and we're working hard to
make it happen before the 2.0 final. The new major features are:

JIT now supports stackless features, that is greenlets and stacklets. This
means that JIT can now optimize the code that switches the context. It enables
running eventlet and gevent on PyPy (although gevent requires some
special support that's not quite finished, read below).

This is the first PyPy release that includes cffi as a core library.
Version 0.6 comes included in the PyPy library. cffi has seen a lot of
adoption among library authors and we believe it's the best way to wrap
C libaries. You can see examples of cffi usage in _curses.py and
_sqlite3.py in the PyPy source code.

What is PyPy?

PyPy is a very compliant Python interpreter, almost a drop-in replacement for
CPython 2.7.3. It's fast (pypy 2.0 beta 2 and cpython 2.7.3
performance comparison) due to its integrated tracing JIT compiler.

This release supports x86 machines running Linux 32/64, Mac OS X 64 or
Windows 32. It also supports ARM machines running Linux, however this is
disabled for the beta 2 release.
Windows 64 work is still stalling, we would welcome a volunteer
to handle that.

callbacks from C are now much faster. pyexpat is about 3x faster, cffi
callbacks around the same

__length_hint__ is implemented (PEP 424)

a lot of numpy improvements

Improvements since 1.9

JIT hooks are now a powerful tool to introspect the JITting process that
PyPy performs

various performance improvements compared to 1.9 and 2.0 beta 1

operations on long objects are now as fast as in CPython (from
roughly 2x slower)

we now have special strategies for dict/set/list which contain
unicode strings, which means that now such collections will be both faster
and more compact.

We're pleased to announce the 2.0 beta 2 release of PyPy. This is a major
release of PyPy and we're getting very close to 2.0 final, however it includes
quite a few new features that require further testing. Please test and report
issues, so we can have a rock-solid 2.0 final. It also includes a performance
regression of about 5% compared to 2.0 beta 1 that we hope to fix before
2.0 final. The ARM support is not working yet and we're working hard to
make it happen before the 2.0 final. The new major features are:

JIT now supports stackless features, that is greenlets and stacklets. This
means that JIT can now optimize the code that switches the context. It enables
running eventlet and gevent on PyPy (although gevent requires some
special support that's not quite finished, read below).

This is the first PyPy release that includes cffi as a core library.
Version 0.6 comes included in the PyPy library. cffi has seen a lot of
adoption among library authors and we believe it's the best way to wrap
C libaries. You can see examples of cffi usage in _curses.py and
_sqlite3.py in the PyPy source code.

What is PyPy?

PyPy is a very compliant Python interpreter, almost a drop-in replacement for
CPython 2.7.3. It's fast (pypy 2.0 beta 2 and cpython 2.7.3
performance comparison) due to its integrated tracing JIT compiler.

This release supports x86 machines running Linux 32/64, Mac OS X 64 or
Windows 32. It also supports ARM machines running Linux, however this is
disabled for the beta 2 release.
Windows 64 work is still stalling, we would welcome a volunteer
to handle that.